Initial Thoughts

What do you think?

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

This is just an initial view on where some of the features stand, and my opinion at the time. Most of these are not things I expect huge change on. I am simply stating my opinion on the current build so the team can get feedback. All of this is meant as constructive and should not be take as anything but that.

 

Units

I feel the units themselves are pretty well done. They are varied enough to allow good unit composition, while keeping the gameplay fairly simple. Even at the current build the units looks well done and render nicely. The biggest issue I have found so far is that all the units feel like they are stuck in molasses. By this I mean they move extremely slow. This isn't an issue on smaller maps, but if you get in a huge map it will be excruciating to wait on the units to traverse the area. I don't feel they need a huge buff to speed, but they need something. Scout units do however need a nice speed boost. As a scout they need to be able to explore the map at a decent speed and will use that speed as a way to escape enemy fire. With this in mind it would be good to see them get a healthy boost. 

 

UI

The UI to me is a love/hate relationship. While I like the overall layout, it does need some refinement. I found the unit boxes on the left overlapped some of the buttons when large forces are made. Overall I feel that the unit layout, information, etc. is pretty well done. It gives you the current information on your forces and allows you the option of quickly selecting anything you need to. I like the resource section as it is right now, and the addition of the victory count is a welcomed one. Most RTS games don't really give you the option to see if you are winning or losing at any given point in the game. The research box is one that I feel could be toggled so that you only see it when needed. So far I like the map and feel that it serves the purpose it was meant to. It's a map, so it is kind of hard to screw up.

The building part of the UI is one area I would like to see some improvement. I like the initial direction, but feel it could be refined to allow quicker selection of buildings, units, etc. I would like to see the bottom bar list Structures, Land units, and Air Units. The next up would list for structures would be Resources, Logistics, Factories, and Defenses. For the Land and Air unit options it would show Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 in the second bar. I am not sure if this would help or hurt the ability to quick build units, but it feels cluttered to me right now.  It would also be useful to the flow of war if we had a button at the bottom of the screen or attached to the map that allowed instant access to our building queues. Having to go back to factories to build takes us away from the battlefield and if we could call up reinforcements while watching the action I feel it would help the game flow.  

The other thing I liked about the building panel is the color of the defensive buildings. I would love to see that theme carried on through each type of building and all the unit tiers. I feel that with the color coordination it gives immediate recognition to the type of building you are going to build and allows new and old players a better understanding of what they are doing. 

 

Gameplay

So far I have to say that the gameplay is enjoyable. Even with the game being very early stage I find it to be fairly engaging to attack, defend, and counter the enemy units. I am very excited to see how the AI will evolve as the development continues. On top of that, it will be very interesting to see how the multiplayer games go. I think the supply line feature is one of the great additions to this game. Once fully realized I think it will go a long way to changed the tide of battles for smart players. It brings a nice since of depth to a large scale RTS game like this. 

 

Research/Unit Progression

Right now the research feels kind of bland. you just plop down 3 research buildings and then click unnamed buttons to get cooler stuff. I honestly don't know what I expected from this, but it just doesn't feel like anything special in the game to me. After playing for a while, I feel like the unit progression through the tiers has a good feel to me. It can be easy to jump ahead and build all the research buildings you need, but without the reactives you are stalled. There could be more done to slow the unit progression so that matches require more effort, but that will evolve as the game gets further into development. With the different tiers of units fighting it out I didn't really notice an extremely over powered unit, but I did find artillery kind of useless for the most part. There range could be buffed some, but I would like to play more and see for sure. I do like that the rocket units, artillery, etc aren't 100% accurate all the time. 

 

Performance

Even on the higher settings I am seeing my performace stay very stable with this build. I'm not seeing anything really killing my frame rate other than zooming out and scrolling across the map. At that point it's kind of expected though. Overall I'd say well done. We will see how future patches and fixes go.

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Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

First impressions after 4 games, all meant as constructive critic. I realize the UI is unfinished and that all of this is going to change, but here is my "feeling right now based on what I see":

UI

- The right click panning is just weird to my head. I am used to panning with middle mouse which does weird camera movements instead. Those btw once allowed me to view the map from below. Not quite sure how I managed to do that. 

- Making selection boxes quite often has a very noticeable delay before it registers the mouse down event. So the box often turns out a lot smaller than I want.

- Generally some random quirks and bugs. Missing information etc. Alpha state stuff I guess you already have on some todo list. The UI needs to manage a lot larger unit amounts in the future I guess. 

- Queuing: I think it is not very helpful that you cannot queue things while you are out of metal. Is there a way to pause production of something? I often had to remove all units from a factory queue, then place the next mex and then requeue in my factory. This especially shows because the first mex spots seem to be just enough to run one factory. Also is there a way to add more than one unit into a factory queue? I don't think you plan to make players queue up every little 3-units group one by one when you want to go into unit counts where you say icons are not useful anymore. I'd like at minimum modifier keys to queue 5 or 100 of one item. Add in an endless loop to make it perfect.

- Fullscreen: The behavior is weird but I like it. When I start the game it somehow weirds out my hdmi-based screen and runs it in some way that makes the screen show black borders. However when I tab out it switches to a properly working windowed fullscreen mode and stays there. Love it like that, perfect for my multi screen setup.

- Zoom: Now that I have played a few games... my opinion has not changed significantly. The UI sure is unfinished and I fully realize that. The UI needs a solution to this kind of issue:

QUICK FIND THE FIGHTER AIR UNIT THINGY THERE ARE BOMBERS ATTACKING!!! (this is the easy version. The hard one has them offscreen and you need to go pan around to search for them)

Also can you tell the unit composition of the little unit group I have? 

Sure these are things that for example Starcraft 2 has not really solved as well -you just need to remember where your units are-, but it is a much smaller scale game and I think a game like ashes ought to at least consider more solutions to it.

So yeah no matter how you put it the current zoom is just weird to me. It allows for more overview than a closed in view (see starcraft 2), but once you zoom out as far as you can you:

a ) still need to scroll around and search for "where did my engineer go?!" There is that units overview tab in the top left but that is still lacking to me. Even if it were really well done how does that tell you the location of a specific thing?

b ) have a hard time to make out what unit is what. I am sure with practice that can be improved and it certainly is playable. But the units becoming hard to deciper when they are only a few pixels in size and I only had to manage smallish armies so far. I agree a "one icon per unit"-concept makes no sense if your armies go into a certain size. But there needs to be some form of abstracted information that quickly tells you where how much of what type of stuff is. Well at least it would be very nice to have. ;)

I often ended up searching around and having to hurt my eye to for example make out an engineer or a specific type of unit I needed, like the aa fighters. Those get tiny once you zoom out.

 

Meta units

So far all I understand about them is:

- they somehow form when I select a bunch of units with some t2+ in them and press Z.

- they seem to give units in them buffs based on what units are in them

Not quite sure about further consequences, I probably dont know enough yet. Also not quire sure how to interpret the UI-information on it so far. Maybe somebody knows more about it?

 

Gameplay in general

I've not really figured out a lot about the exact relations between units so far, so dunno for the most part. Things that did come into my mind:

- there is a lot of creeps it seem. Half the game vs AI is spent fighthing creeps. Actually probably more than that. No idea how that will work out in MP.

- Factories are cheap it seems. I guess it will be good to take an engineer with your army and make factories at the front to directly reinforce right there.

- There seems to be not much you can do to push your economy. Especially metal seemed to be rather rare to me. You start at 1 metal/s and I think the biggest I ever had was 11. Maybe I am doing something wrong. The only tech thing in that area appears to be the refineries. Do I understand correctly that the player needs to *not spent* their resources, make a refinery and then gets extra resources? Usually in RTS it is a good idea for players to spent all their resources asap. Giving players bonus resources who do not spent their resources sounds weird. I have not experimented enough, but it seems ... weird to me. Does this mean players might need to actually *wait* for the resources to fill and then balance it so they have a certain amount of resources into their storage all game to get extra resources?

- unit counts in my first few test games did not reach any sort of level that is above a few hundred at most. I guess in the current "balance" (yeah early alpha I know) and on the maps we have that is how it is? Well not sure how MP turns out.

 

Performance/Tech stuff

The game crashed twice in 4 games, in the 2nd and 4th game I played. In the 2nd it was directly after spawn on the medium-map. In the 4th I first somehow broke the economy system after maybe 45 minutes of playing:

once I had reached this state it also let me build stuff at unlimited speed. So I sent in an army of a dozens t3 ships :D

Then I tried to make a few hundred units. This worked out however when I tried to select them I could not get all of them into my selection. When I tried to add more units to my selection via shift it crashed the game.

Performance was completely fine. No issues at all running on an i5 3550, 16GB  ram, Radeon HD 7850/2G

 

How does ashes btw actually work? Is it p2p like SupCom? Or client-server like Planetary Annihilation?